Lemon meringue cupcakes become reality!

I posted a lemon meringue cupcake recipe in Future Files a week or two ago, with full intention of making these for more than just the three of us! As the Goerlitz Jr.s were coming over for Mother's Day weekend, it seemed a great opportunity to give these a whirl. And since baking gluten-free means Lucy gets to eat along, I thought it would be a good opportunity to break out some gluten-free baking mixes I've seen around, too.

I got the Namaste brand vanilla cake mix, and then lemoned it up--instead of the water it called for in the recipe, I just added fresh sqeezed lemon juice. The cakes themselves smelled lemony as I was spooning them into the cupcake papers, so I was pretty confident it would work out OK.

Once those were made and the lemon curd as well, it was just a matter of waiting for Master Apprentice Maizy to show up and assist in the meringue making and assembly. Saturday morning we busted out the egg whites and made the cute meringue toppings in no time.

I experimented with a new lemon curd recipe, which you can find here: A Foolproof Way to Make Lucious, Light Lemon Curd. It turned out really well, especially great considering that I used a non-dairy, non-soy shortening to use as the fat replacement for butter, by Spectrum. It looked and acted a lot like Crisco.

The meringue recipe was pretty basic: I pretty much followed the one in the original recipe, but of course thought to myself, "There's no way only 4 egg whites [I was already doubling from the original recipe!] will make enough meringue," and in true Sher-fashion I doubled it (again!), only to have twice as much meringue as needed. (Which did lead to a serendipitous brunch pavlova for Sunday, so there. See Sunday brunch post to follow.)

Once the meringues baked up, it was a happy little project to put the curd on the cupcake and top it all off with a little meringue hat. Very cute. They got mixed reviews from the crowd; the cupcakes themselves were a little dense for the adults, and the lemon curd was a little intense for the kids. But they are definitely worth keeping around as a fun dessert, and I'll probably try them again without the gluten free constraint and see how that goes.